


this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

by softlyinthestreetlights



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 90 year olds go on really cute dates, Fluff with a hint of angst, M/M, in which steve owes tony a great big hug, the overuse of space tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-10 05:28:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2012715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyinthestreetlights/pseuds/softlyinthestreetlights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Bucky are back in the modern world.</p><p>In which Steve develops a passion for space and Bucky finds out what's around the corner on Franklin Street.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

Bucky always liked science, and while they’d been away science had been busy without them. Steve had been horrified to find out about the atomic bomb, in fact he was horrified about a lot of things. The world has become an even darker place than he remembered.

Without Bucky the world had just been darker.

It’s Tony that that talks to him through most of it. It’s Tony who talks to him about what science has done good by the world, who shows him clips from the latest World Expo and demonstrates about particle accelerators, theoretical experiments involving the human brain, developments in medicine, and it’s on cloudless nights on top of the Stark Tower in cheap lawn chairs and drinking corner store beer that Tony talks about space.

Tony talks about the galaxies. How they have spiral arms and black holes larger than the circumference of the Earth at the center of every one. How the moon landing taught people how to dream. I doesn’t take long for Steve to start dreaming about the stars as well. It’s been less than a month since he’s been brought back to the modern world and I occurs to him one day over cereal with too much milk in it (“You just make it all soggy.” Bucky waves his spoon around, his own bowl filled with Honey Bunches of Oats and lacking any trace of dairy. It’s a crime. It really is.) that Bucky might not know about any of the space stuff either.

It could be a surprise.

Colson is all too happy to drive them, as it turns out 70 year old drivers licenses aren’t good for anything but collectibles anymore.

And a couple days later it turns out Bucky is a good sport. Steve was always the one that hated surprises. Years of being apart, learning new habits, means that Bucky is still a bit tense, but otherwise excited beside Steve in the backseat.

“I keep preparing for the worst,” he whispers into the cotton sheets at night, when Steve is half awake but just conscious enough to listen. Steve knows the feeling. If they gather each other closer in the moonlight from the open window then no one else has to know.

When they turn the corner on Franklin he tells Bucky to look, on his left, at the entrance sign.

FRANKLIN STREET SCIENCE CENTER  
AND PLANETARIUM

Some of the tenseness bleeds out onto the floor mats in anxious puddles but doesn’t follow them onto the sidewalk. He is happier. Happier after all the time they’ve spent apart to see the lights shining behind Bucky’s eyes.

“I still don’t know how much we missed exactly, but the stars seem like a safe place to start.”

(He looks at you and eclipses the sun.)

Bucky sends a vague ‘thank you’ to Louis Armstrong and takes Steve’s hand in his own, even when they’re both too hot, hands too sweaty, for hand holding to really be comfortable.

“I already lost you once.” He breathes into the tight whorl of his best friends’ ear. The eve before some battle or another, it won’t be the turning point of the war, but if they’re in it (if he’s in it), then that makes it important enough. “I already lost you once but not again.” So yes, they hold hands and cling to each other (no matter how barely they touch).

They wander the halls, exhibit after exhibit of the solar system and stars and the fabric of the universe.

(The fabric of the universe in cotton sheets thrown across two molded men who mean more to each other than all the spirals in the sky.)

They see a giant wall printed with the cosmos. It looks so real, is so large, that it feels like they’re standing on the lip of space, watching the galaxies turn around the atom at the center of it all. For all they can see the universe might be orbiting them. Suns burning. Planets colliding. Something bigger than them controlling all life and death in the universe. It’s all spread out before them but it’s too much for either of them to take.

“I’ve seen too many of my friends die.” he says, overlooking the river. It’s one trench he can’t afford to fall into. Not this time. “I’ve seen too many of my friends die.” But what he really means is: “I almost saw you die. For a second, for that blip in time, I thought you did. You’re here now, but part of me died with you. I want it back but I don’t know how to ask.” And that’s okay. Companionable silence is enough for both you. This is one friend you can’t afford to lose.

They spend the afternoon in the telescope room, sitting through two different shows and watching the stars turn overhead. The Southern Constellations are different from the Northern ones as it turns out. They have their own names and their own places in another sky.

“They make me dizzy.” It’s a whisper, a shout in the planetary dark, but of course he hears it anyways. He takes up Bucky’s hand again, this time under the light of all their stars. Universes are born in the space between where their fingers tangle with each other. Stars free fall and find their orbit where they leave finger prints on each other’s palms.

“I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.” He says it like he means it. He always means it, somehow, and somehow you always believe him. No matter how many times you think you lose  
him he comes back to you. The thing you let go and all that. Life keeps giving you second chances and you’re not fool enough to pass any of them up.

Neither of them know who started it, but Bucky knows that they’re under a canopy of stars, Steve’s face is clearer than all the galaxies on the large wall in the other room, and that a kiss from him is all he wants in the world. In fact, just because it’s fitting and slightly ironic for his own reasons, it may be all he wants in the universe.

(He takes your lips and you take his. Southern constellations flood your system, sending teacup sized storms to every part of you that after all this time, can’t believe this is quite happening. Where your fingers are still touching his, they tingle. And if they spark a bit in the dark two pairs of eyes are too closed to tell.)

**Author's Note:**

> An eye,
> 
> ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’  
> from the mad webs of Uranusborg
> 
> encountering the NOVA 
> 
> every impulse of light exploding
> 
> from the core  
> as life flies out of us
> 
> Tycho whispering at last  
> ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
> 
> ~Planetarium by Adrienne Rich
> 
> Title credit to the wonderful ee cummings and his poem [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]. You are an inspiration sir.


End file.
